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Adams ,  Charles  Francis 


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Acolleee  fetich 


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UC  SOUTHERN  REGIONAL  JBRARV  FAClL:Tv 

1         III            11 

LIBRARY 

ONIVERSITY  OP  CALIFORNIA 

RIVERStOE 


A  COLLEGE    FETICH. 


CHARLES    FRANCIS   ADAMS,   JR. 


A   COLLEGE  FETICH. 


AN      ADDRESS 

DELIVERED    BEFORE 

€I)e  i^artart)  Cliapter 

OF    THE 

FRATERNITY  OF  THE  PHI  BETA  KAPPA, 

IN  SANDERS    THEATRE,   CAMBRIDGE, 
June  28,  1883. 


By  CHARLES   FRANCIS   ADAMS,   Jr. 


BOSTON: 
LEE    AND    SHEPARD,    PUBLISHERS. 

NEW    YORK: 

CHARLES    T.    DILLINGHAM. 

1883. 


Copyright,  1883, 
By  C.  F.  Adams,  Jr. 


(lambriUgc : 

PRINTED    BV    JOHN     WILSON    AND    SON. 
UNIVERSITY    fRKSS. 


ADDRESS. 


I  AM  here  to-day  for  a  purpose.  After  no  little  hesitation 
I  accepted  the  invitation  to  address  your  Society,  simply 
because  I  had  something  which  I  much  wanted  to  say;  and 
this  seemed  to  me  the  best  possible  place,  and  this  the  most 
appropriate  occasion,  for  saying  it.  My  message,  if  such  I 
may  venture  to  call  it,  is  in  nowise  sensational.  On  the  con- 
trary, it  partakes,  I  fear,  rather  of  the  commonplace.  Such 
being  the  case,  I  shall  give  it  the  most  direct  utterance  of 
which  I  am  capable. 

It  is  twenty-seven  years  since  the  class  of  which  I  was  a 
member  was  graduated  from  this  college.  To-day  I  have  come 
back  here  to  take,  for  the  first  time,  an  active  part  of  any 
prominence  in  the  exercises  of  its  Commencement  week.  I 
have  come  back,  as  what  we  are  pleased  to  term  an  educated 
man,  to  speak  to  educated  men ;  a  literary  man,  as  literary 
men  go,  I  have  undertaken  to  address  a  literary  society;  a 
man  who  has,  in  any  event,  led  an  active,  changeable,  bustling 
life,  I  am  to  say  what  I  have  to  say  to  men,  not  all  of  whom 
have  led  similar  lives.  It  is  easy  to  imagine  one  who  had 
contended  in  the  classic  games  returning,  after  they  were  over, 
to  the  gymnasium  in  which  he  had  been  trained.  It  would 
not  greatly  matter  whether  he  had  acquitted  himself  well  or  ill 
in  the  arena,  —  whether  he  had  come  back  crowned  with  vie- 


4  A   COLLEGE   FETICH. 

tory  or  broken  by  defeat:  in  the  full  light  of  his  experience  of 
the  struggle,  he  would  be  disposed  to  look  over  the  old  para- 
phernalia, and  recall  the  familiar  exercises,  passing  judgment 
upon  them.  Tested  by  hard,  actual  results,  was  the  theory  of 
his  training  correct  ;  were  the  appliances  of  the  gymnasium 
good ;  did  what  he  got  there  contribute  to  his  victory,  or  had 
it  led  to  his  defeat?  Taken  altogether,  was  he  strengthened, 
or  had  he  been  emasculated  by  his  gymnasium  course?  The 
college  was  our  gymnasium.  It  is  now  the  gymnasium  of  our 
children.  Thirty  years  after  graduation  a  man  has  either  won 
or  lost  the  game.  Winner  or  loser,  looking  back  through  the 
medium  of  that  thirty  years  of  hard  experience,  how  do  we 
see  the  college  now? 

It  would  be  strange,  indeed,  if  from  this  point  of  view  we 
regarded  it,  its  theories  and  its  methods,  with  either  unmixed 
approval  or  unmixed  condemnation.  I  cannot  deny  that  the 
Cambridge  of  the  sixth  decennium  of  the  century,  as  Thack- 
eray would  have  phrased  it,  was  in  many  respects  a  pleasant 
place.  There  were  good  things  about  it.  By  the  student  who 
understood  himself,  and  knew  what  he  wanted,  much  might 
here  be  learned ;  while  for  most  of  us  the  requirements  were 
not  excessive.  We  of  the  average  majority  did  not  under- 
stand ourselves,  or  know  what  we  wanted :  the  average  man  of 
the  majority  rarely  does.  And  so  for  us  the  college  course, 
instead  of  being  a  time  of  preparation  for  the  hard  work  of 
life,  was  a  pleasant  sort  of  vacation  rather,  before  that  work 
began.  We  so  regarded  it.  I  should  be  very  sorry  not  to 
have  enjoyed  that  vacation.  I  am  glad  that  I  came  here,  and 
glad  that  I  took  my  degree.  But  as  a  training-place  for  youth 
to  enable  them  to  engage  to  advantage  in  the  struggle  of  life, 
—  to  fit  them  to  hold  their  own  in  it,  and  to  carry  off  the 
prizes,  —  I  must  in  all  honesty  say,  that,  looking  back  through 
the  years,  and  recalling  the  requirements  and  methods  of  the 
ancient  institution,  I  am  unable  to  speak  of  it  with  all  the  re- 
spect I  could  wish.     Such  training  as  I  got;  useful  for  the 


A   COLLEGE   FETICH.  5 

struggle,  I  got  after,  instead  of  before  graduation,  and  it  came 
hard;  while  I  never  have  been  able — ^and  now,  no  matter  how 
long  I  may  live,  I  never  shall  be  able  —  to  overcome  some  great 
disadvantages  which  the  superstitions  and  wrong  theories  and 
worse  practices  of  my  Alma  Mater  inflicted  upon  me.  And 
not  on  me  alone.  The  same  may  be  said  of  my  contem- 
poraries, as  I  have  observed  them  in  success  and  failure. 
What  was  true  in  this  respect  of  the  college  of  thirty  years 
ago  is,  I  apprehend,  at  least  partially  true  of  .the  college  of 
to-day;  and  it  is  true  not  only  of  Cambridge,  but  of  other 
colleges,  and  of  them  quite  as  much  as  of  Cambridge.  They 
fail  properly  to  fit  their  graduates  for  the  work  they  have  to 
do  in  the  life  that  awaits  them. 

This  is  harsh  language  to  apply  to  one's  nursing  mother, 
and  it  calls  for  an  explanation.  That  explanation  I  shall  now 
try  to  give.  I  have  said  that  the  college  of  thirty  years  ago 
did  not  fit  its  graduates  for  the  work  they  had  to  do  in  the 
actual  life  which  awaited  them.  Let  us  consider  for  a  moment 
what  that  life  has  been,  and  then  we  will  pass  to  the  prepara- 
tion we  received  for  it.  When  the  men  of  my  time  graduated, 
Franklin  Pierce  was  President,  the  war  in  the  Crimea  was  just 
over,  and  three  years  were  yet  to  pass  before  Solferino  would 
be  fought.  No  united  Germany  and  no  united  Italy  existed. 
The  railroad  and  the  telegraph  were  in  their  infancy ;  neither 
nitro-glycerine  nor  the  telephone  had  been  discovered.  The 
years  since  then  have  been  fairly  crammed  with  events.  A 
new  world  has  come  into  existence,  and  a  world  wholly  unlike 
that  of  our  fathers,  —  unlike  it  in  peace  and  unlike  it  in  war. 
It  is  a  world  of  great  intellectual  quickening,  which  has  ex- 
tended until  it  now  touches  a  vastly  larger  number  of  men,  in 
many  more  countries,  than  it  ever  touched  before.  Not  only 
have  the  nations  been  rudely  shaken  up,  but  they  have  been 
drawn  together.  Interdependent  thought  has  been  carried  on, 
interacting  agencies  have  been  at  work  in  widely  separated 
countries  and  different  tongues.     The  solidarity  of  the  pco- 


6  A  COLLEGE   FETICH. 

pies  has  been  developed.  Old  professions  have  lost  their 
prominence;  new  profciisions  have  arisen.  Science  has  ex- 
tended its  domains,  and  superseded  authority  with  bewildering 
rapidity.  The  artificial  barriers — national,  political,  social, 
economical,  religious,  intellectual  —  have  given  way  in  every 
direction,  and  the  civilized  races  of  the  world  are  becoming 
one  people,  even  if  a  discordant  and  quarrelsome  people.  We 
all  of  us  live  more  in  the  present  and  less  in  the  past  than  we 
did  thirty  years  ago,  —  much  less  in  the  past  and  much  more 
in  the  present  than  those  who  preceded  us  did  fifty  years 
ago.  The  world  as  it  is  may  be  a  very  bad  and  a  very  vulgar 
world,  —  insincere,  democratic,  disrespectful,  dangerous,  and 
altogether  hopeless.  I  do  not  think  it  is ;  but  with  that  thesis 
I  have,  here  and  now,  nothing  to  do.  However  bad  and  hope- 
less, it  is  nevertheless  the  world  in  which  our  lot  was  cast,  and 
in  which  we  have  had  to  live,  —  a  bustling,  active,  nervous 
world,  and  one  very  hard  to  keep  up  with.  This  much  all 
will  admit;  while  I  think  I  may  further  add,  that  its  most 
marked  characteristic  has  been  an  intense  mental  and  physical 
activity,  which,  working  simultaneously  in  many  tongues,  has 
attempted  much  and  questioned  all  things. 

Now  as  respects  the  college  preparation  we  received  to  fit 
us  to  take  part  in  this  world's  debate.  As  one  goes  on  in  life, 
especially  in  modern  life,  a  few  conclusions  are  hammered  into 
us  by  the  hard  logic  of  facts.  Among  those  conclusions,  I 
think  I  may,  without  much  fear  of  contradiction,  enumerate 
such  practical,  common-sense  and  commonplace  precepts  as 
that  superficiality  is  dangerous,  as  well  as  contemptible,  in  that 
it  is  apt  to  invite  defeat;  or,  again,  that  what  is  worth  doing  at 
all  is  worth  doing  well;  or,  third,  that  when  one  is  given 
work  to  do,  it  is  well  to  prepare  one's  self  for  that  specific  work, 
and  not  to  occupy  one's  time  in  acquiring  information,  no 
matter  how  innocent  or  elegant,  or  generally  useful,  which  has 
no  probable  bearing  on  that  work ;  or,  finally,  —  and  this  I 
regard  as  the  greatest  of  all  practical  pi*ecepts,  —  that  every  man 


A   COLLEGE   FETICH.  7 

should  in  life  master  some  one  thing,  be  it  great  or  be  it  small, 
so  that  thereon  he  may  be  the  highest  living  authority :  that 
one  thing  he  should  know  thoroughly. 

How  did  Harvard  College  prepare  me,  and  my  ninety-two 
classmates  of  the  year  1856,.  for  our  work  in  a  life  in  which 
we  have  had  these  homely  precepts  brought  close  to  us?  In 
answering  the  question  it  is  not  altogether  easy  to  preserve 
one's  gravity.  The  college  fitted  us  for  this  active,  bustling, 
hard-hitting,  many-tongued  world,  caring  nothing  for  authority 
and  little  for  the  past,  but  full  of  its  living  thought  and  living 
issues,  in  dealing  with  which  there  was  no  man  who  did  not 
stand  in  pressing  and  constant  need  of  every  possible  prepara- 
tion as  respects  knowledge  and  exactitude  and  thoroughness, 
—  the  poor  old  college  prepared  us  to  play  our  parts  in  this 
world  by  compelling  us,  directly  and  indirectly,  to  devote  the 
best  part  of  our  school  lives  to  acquiring  a  confessedly  super- 
ficial knowledge  of  two  dead  languages. 

In  regard  to  the  theory  of  what  we  call  a  liberal  education, 
tjiere  is,  as  I  understand  it,  not  much  room  for  difference  of 
opinion.  There  are  certain  fundamental  requirements,  without 
a  thorough  mastery  of  which  no  one  can  pursue  a  specialty  to 
advantage.  Upon  these  common  fundamentals  are  grafted 
the  specialties,  —  the  students'  clectives,  as  wc  call  them.  The 
man  is  simply  mad,  who  in  these  days  takes  all  knowledge  for 
his  province.  He  who  professes  to  do  so  can  only  mean 
that  he  proposes,  in  so  far  as  in  him  lies,  to  reduce  super- 
ficiality to  a  science. 

Such  is  the  theory.  Now  what  is  the  practice?  Thirty 
years  ago,  as  for  three  centuries  before,  Greek  and  Latin  were 
the  fundamentals.  The  grammatical  study  of  two  dead  lan- 
guages was  the  basis  of  all  liberal  education.  It  is  still  its 
basis.  But,  following  the  theory  out,  I  think  all  will  admit 
that,  as  respects  the  fundamentals,  the  college  training  should 
be  compulsory  and  severe.  It  should  extend  through  the 
whole  course.    No  one  ought  to  become  a  Bachelor  of  Arts 


8  A   COLLEGE   FETICH. 

until,  upon  these  fundamentals,  he  had  passed  an  examination, 
the  scope  and  thoroughness  of  which  should  set  at  defiance 
what  is  perfectly  well  defined  as  the  science  of  cramming. 
Could  the  graduates  of  my  time  have  passed  such  an  exami- 
nation in  Latin  and  Greek?  If  tUey  could  have  done  that,  I 
should  now  see  a  reason  in  the  course  pursued  with  us.  When 
we  were  graduated,  we  should  have  acquired  a  training,  such 
as  it  was ;  it  would  have  amounted  to  something ;  and,  hav- 
ing a  bearing  on  the  future,  it  would  have  been  of  use  in  it. 
But  it  never  was  for  a  moment  assiimed  that  we  could  have 
passed  any  such  examination.  In  justice  to  all,  I  must  admit 
that  no  self-deception  was  indulged  in  on  this  point.  Not  only 
was  the  knowledge  of  our  theoretical  fundamentals  to  the  last 
degree  superficial,  but  nothing  better  was  expected.  The  re- 
quirements spoke  for  themselves;  and  the  subsequent  exam- 
inations never  could  have  deceived  any  one  who  had  a  proper 
conception  of  what  real  knowledge  was. 

But  in  pursuing  Greek  and  Latin  we  had  ignored  our  mother 
tongue.  We  were  no  more  competent  to  pass  a  really  search- 
ing examination  in  English  literature  and  English  composi- 
tion than  in  the  languages  and  literature  of  Greece  and  Rome. 
We  were  college  graduates ;  and  yet  how  many  of  us  could 
follow  out  a  line  of  sustained,  close  thought,  expressing  our- 
selves in  clear,  concise  terms?  The  faculty  of  doing  this  should 
result  from  a  mastery  of  well  selected  fundamentals.  The 
difficulty  was  that  the  fundamentals  were  not  well  selected,  and 
they  had  never  been  mastered.  They  had  become  a  tradition. 
They  were  studied  no  longer  as  a  means,  but  as  an  end,  —  the 
end  being  to  get  into  college.  Accordingly,  thirty  years  ago 
there  was  no  real  living  basis  of  a  Harvard  education.  Honest, 
solid  foundations  were  not  laid.  The  superstructure,  such  as  it 
was,  rested  upon  an  empty  formula. 

The  reason  of  all  this  I  could  not  understand  then,  though  it 
is  clear  enough  to  me  now.  I  take  it  to  be  simply  this :  The 
classic  tongues  were  far  more  remote  from  our  world  than  they 


A   COLLEGE   FETICH.  9 

had  been  from  the  world  our  fathers  lived  in.  They  are  much 
more  remote  from  the  world  of  to-day  than  they  were  from 
the  world  of  thirty  years  ago.  The  human  mind,  outside  of 
the  cloisters,  is  occupied  with  other  and  more  pressing  things. 
Especially  is  it  occupied  with  a  class  of  thoughts  —  scientific 
thoughts  —  which  do  not  find  their  nutriment  in  the  remote 
past.  They  are  not  in  sympathy  with  it.  Accordingly,  the 
world  turns  more  and  more  from  the  classics  to  those  other  and 
living  sources,  in  which  alone  it  finds  what  it  seeks.  Students 
come  to  college  from  the  hearthstones  of  the  modern  world. 
They  have  been  brought  up  in  the  new  atmosphere.  They  are 
consequently  more  and  more  disposed  to  regard  the  dead 
languages  as  a  mere  requirement  to  college  admission.  This 
reacts  upon  the  institution.  The  college  does  not  change,  — 
there  is  no  conservatism  I  have  ever  met,  so  hard,  so  unrea- 
soning, so  impenetrable,  as  the  conservatism  of  professional 
educators  about  their  methods,  —  the  college  does  not  change; 
it  only  accepts  the  situation.  The  routine  goes  on,  but  super- 
ficiality is  accepted  as  of  course;  and  so  thirty  years  ago,  as 
now,  a  surface  acquaintance  with  two  dead  languages  was  the 
chief  requirement  for  admission  to  Harvard ;  and  to  acquiring 
it,  years  of  school  life  were  devoted. 

Nor  in  my  time  did  the  mischief  end  here.  On  the  contrary, 
it  began  here.  As  a  slipshod  method  of  training  was  accepted 
in  those  studies  to  which  the  greatest  prominence  was  given, 
the  same  method  was  accepted  in  other  studies.  The  whole 
standard  was  lowered.  Thirty  years  ago  —  I  say  it  after  a  care- 
ful search  through  my  memory  —  thoroughness  of  training  in 
any  real-life  sense  of  the  term  was  unknown  in  those  branches 
of  college  education  with  which  I  came  in  contact.  Every- 
thing was  taught  as  Latin  and  Greek  were  taught.  Even  now, 
I  do  not  see  how  I  could  have  got  solid,  exhaustive  teaching  in 
the  class-room,  even  if  I  had  known  enough  to  want  it.  A 
limp  superficiality  was  all  pervasive.  To  the  best  of  my  recol- 
lection the  idea  of  hard  thoroughness  was  not  there.  It  may 
be  there  now.     I  hope  it  is. 


lO  A  COLLEGE  FETICH. 

And  here  let  me  define  my  position  on  several  points,  so  that 
I  shall  be  misunderstood  only  by  such  as  wilfully  misunder- 
stand, in  order  to  misrepresent.  With  such  I  hold  no  argu- 
ment. In  the  first  place  I  desire  to  say  that  I  am  no  believer 
in  that  narrow  scientific  and  technological  training  which  now 
and  again  we  hear  extolled.  A  practical,  and  too  often  a  mere 
vulgar,  money-making  utility  seems  to  be  its  natural  outcome. 
On  the  contrary,  the  whole  experience  and  observation  of  my 
life  lead  me  to  look  with  greater  admiration,  and  an  envy  ever 
increasing,  on  the  broadened  culture  Avhich  is  the  true  end  and 
aim  of  the  University.  On  this  point  I  cannot  be  too  expHcit; 
for  I  should  be  sorry  indeed  if  anything  I  might  utter  were 
construed  into  an  argument  against  the  most  liberal  education. 
There  is  a  considerable  period  in  every  man's  life,  when  the 
best  thing  he  can  do  is  to  let  his  mind  soak  and  tan  in  the 
vats  of  literature.  The  atmosphere  of  a  university  is  breathed 
into  the  student's  system,  —  it  enters  by  the  very  pores.  But, 
just  as  all  roads  lead  to  Rome,  so  I  hold  there  may  be  a  modern 
road  as  well  as  the  classic  avenue  to  the  goal  of  a  true  liberal 
education.  I  object  to  no  man's  causing  his  children  to  ap- 
proach that  goal  by  the  old,  the  time-honored  entrance.  On 
the  contrary  I  will  admit  that,  for  those  who  travel  it  well,  it  is 
the  best  entrance.  But  I  do  ask  that  the  modern  entrance 
should  not  be  closed.  Vested  interests  always  look  upon  a 
claim  for  simple  recognition  as  a  covert  attack  on  their  very 
existence,  and  the  advocates  of  an  exclusively  classic  college- 
education  are  quick  to  interpret  a  desire  for  modern  learning, 
as  a  covert  attack  on  dead  learning.  I  have  no  wish  to  attack 
it,  except  in  its  spirit  of  selfish  exclusiveness.  I  do  challenge 
the  right  of  the  classicist  to  longer  say  that  by  his  path,  and 
by  his  path  only,  shall  the  University  be  approached.  I  would 
not  narrow  the  basis  of  liberal  education ;  I  would  broaden 
it.  No  longer  content  with  classic  sources,  I  would  have  the 
University  seek  fresh  inspiration  at  the  fountains  of  living 
thought;  for  Goctlie  I  hold  to  be  the  equal  of  Sophocles,  and 


A  COLLEGE  FETICH.  II 

I  prefer  the  philosophy  of  Montaigne  to  what  seem   to  me 
the  platitudes  of  Cicero. 

Neither,  though  venturing  on  these  comparisons,  have  I  any 
light  or  disrespectful  word  to  utter  of  the  study  of  Latin  or  of 
Greek,  much  less  of  the  classic  literatures.  While  recognizing 
fully  the  benefit  to  be  derived  from  a  severe  training  in  these 
mother  tongues,  I  fully  appreciate  the  pleasure  those  must  have 
who  enjoy  an  easy  familiarity  with  the  authors  who  yet  live  in 
them.  No  one  admires  —  I  am  not  prepared  to  admit  that  any 
one  can  admire  —  more  than  I  the  subtile,  indescribable  fineness, 
both  of  thought  and  diction,  which  a  thorough  classical  educa- 
tion gives  to  the  scholar.  Mr.  Gladstone  is,  as  Macaulay  was, 
a  striking  case  in  point.  As  much  as  any  one  I  note  and  de- 
plore the  absence  of  this  literary  Tower-stamp  in  the  writings 
and  utterances  of  many  of  our  own  authors  and  public  men. 
But  its  absence  is  not  so  deplorable  as  that  display  of  cheap 
learning  which  made  the  American  oration  of  thirty  and  fifty 
years  ago  a  national  humiliation.  Even  in  its  best  form  it 
was  bedizened  with  classic  tinsel  which  bespoke  the  vanity 
of  the  half-taught  scholar.  We  no  longer  admire  that  sort  of 
thing.  But  among  men  of  my  own  generation  I  do  both  ad- 
mire and  envy  those  who  I  am  told  make  it  a  daily  rule  to 
read  a  little  of  Homer  or  Thucydides,  of  Horace  or  Tacitus. 
I  wish  I  could  do  the  same;  and  yet  I  must  frankly  say  I 
should  not  do  it  if  I  could.  Life  after  all  is  limited,  and  I 
belong  enough  to  the  present  to  feel  satisfied  that  I  could 
employ  that  little  time  each  day  both  more  enjoyably  and 
more  profitably  if  I  should  devote  it  to  keeping  pace  with 
modern  thought,  as  it  finds  expression  even  in  the  ephemeral 
pages  of  the  despised  review.  Do  what  he  will,  no  man  can 
keep  pace  with  that  wonderful  modern  thought ;  and  if  I  must 
choose,  —  and  choose  I  must,  —  I  would  rather  learn  some- 
thing daily  from  the  living  who  are  to  perish,  than  daily  muse 
with  the  immortal  dead.  Yet  for  the  purpose  of  my  argu- 
ment I  do  not  for  a  moment  dispute  the  superiority  —  I  am 


12  A   COLLEGE   FETICH. 

ready  to  say  the  hopeless,  the  unattainable  superiority  —  of 
the  classic  masterpieces.  They  are  sealed  books  to  me,  as  they 
are  to  at  least  nineteert  out  of  twenty  of  the  graduates  of  our 
colleges ;  and  we  can  neither  affirm  nor  deny  that  in  them,  and 
in  them  alone,  are  to  be  found  the  choicest  thoughts  of  the 
human  mind  and  the  most  perfect  forms  of  human  speech. 

All  that  has  nothing  to  do  with  the  question.  We  are  not 
living  in  any  ideal  world.  We  are  living  in  this  world  of  to- 
day; and  it  is  the  business  of  the  college  to  fit  men  for  it. 
Does  she  do  it?  As  I  have  said,  my  own  experience  of  thirty 
years  ago  tells  me  that  she  did  not  do  it  then.  The  facts 
being  much  the  same,  I  do  not  see  how  she  can  do  it  now.  It 
seems  to  me  she  starts  from  a  radically  wrong  basis.  It  is, 
to  use  plain  language,  a  basis  of  fetich  worship,  in  which  the 
real  and  practical  is  systematically  sacrificed  to  the  ideal  and 
theoretical. 

To-day,  whether  I  want  to  or  not,  I  must  speak  from  indi- 
vidual experience.  Indeed,  I  have  no  other  ground  on  which 
to  stand.  I  am  not  a  scholar ;  I  am  not  an  educator ;  I  am 
not  a  philosopher;  but  I  submit  that  in  educational  matters 
individual,  practical  experience  is  entitled  to  some  weight. 
Not  one  man  in  ten  thousand  can  contribute  anything  to  this 
discussion  in  the  way  of  more  profound  views  or  deeper  in- 
sight. Yet  any  concrete,  actual  experience,  if  it  be  only  sim- 
ply and  directly  told,  may  prove  a  contribution  of  value,  and 
that  contribution  we  all  can  bring.  An  average  college  gra- 
duate, I  am  here  to  subject  the  college  theories  to  the  practical 
test  of  an  experience  in  the  tussle  of  life.  Recurring  to  the 
simile  with  which  I  began,  the  wrestler  in  the  games  is  back  at 
the  gymnasium.  If  he  is  to  talk  to  any  good  purpose  he  must 
talk  of  himself,  and  how  he  fared  in  the  struggle.  It  is  he  who 
speaks. 

I  was  fitted  for  college  in  the  usual  way.  I  went  to  the  Latin 
School ;  I  learned  the  two  grammars  by  heart ;  at  length  I 
could  even  puzzle  out  the  simpler  classic  writings  with  the  aid 


A   COLLEGE   FETICH.  1 3 

of  a  lexicon,  and  apply  more  or  less  correctly  the  rules  of  con- 
struction. This,  and  the  other  rudiments  of  what  we  are 
pleased  to  call  a  liberal  education,  took  five  years  of  my  time. 
I  was  fortunately  fond  of  reading,  and  so  learned  English 
myself,  and  with  some  thoroughness.  I  say  fortunately,  for  in 
our  preparatory  curriculum  no  place  was  found  for  English; 
being  a  modern  language,  it  was  thought  n(5t  worth  studying, 
—  as  our  examination  papers  conclusively  showed.  We  turned 
English  into  bad  enough  Greek,  but  our  thoughts  were  ex- 
pressed in  even  more  abominable  English.  I  then  went  to  col- 
lege, —  to  Harvard.  I  have  already  spoken  of  the  standard  of 
instruction,  so  far  as  thoroughness  was  concerned,  then  pre- 
vailing here.  Presently  I  was  graduated,  and  passed  some 
years  in  the  study  of  the  law.  Thus  far,  as  you  will  see,  my 
course  was  thoroughly  correct.  It  was  the  course  pursued  by 
a  large  proportion  of  all  graduates  then,  and  the  course  pur- 
sued by  more  than  a  third  of  them  now.  Then  the  War  of  the 
Rebellion  came,  and  swept  me  out  of  a  lawyer's  office  into  a 
cavalry  saddle.  Let  me  say,  in  passing,  that  I  have  always  felt 
under  deep  personal  obligation  to  the  War  of  the  Rebellion. 
Returning  presently  to  civil  life,  and  not  taking  kindly  to  my 
profession,  I  endeavored  to  strike  out  a  new  path,  and  fastened 
myself,  not,  as  Mr.  Emerson  recommends,  to  a  star,  but  to  the 
locomotive-engine,  I  made  for  myself  what  might  perhaps  be 
called  a  specialty  in  connection  with  the  development  of  the 
railroad  system.  I  do  not  hesitate  to  say  that  I  have  been 
incapacitated  from  properly  developing  my  specialty,  by  the 
sins  of  omission  and  commission  incident  to  my  college  train- 
ing. The  mischief  is  done,  and  so  far  as  I  am  concerned  is 
irreparable.  I  am  only  one  more  sacrifice  to  the  fetich.  But 
I  do  not  propose  to  be  a  silent  sacrifice.  I  am  here  to-day  to 
put  the  responsibility  for  my  failure,  so  far  as  I  have  failed, 
where  I  think  it  belongs,  —  at  the  door  of  my  preparatory  and 
college  education. 

Nor  has  that  incapacity,  and  the  conscqi:cnt  failure  to  which 


14  A  COLLEGE  FETICIL 

I  have  referred,  been  a  mere  thing  of  imagination  or  sentiment. 
On  the  contrary,  it  has  been  not  only  matter-of-fact  and  real, 
but  to  the  last  degree  humiliating.  1  have  not,  in  following 
out  my  specialty,  had  at  my  command  —  nor  has  it  been  in  my 
power,  placed  as  I  was,  to  acquire  —  the  ordinary  tools  which 
an  educated  man  must  have  to  enable  him  to  work  to  advantage 
on  the  developing  problems  of  modern,  scientific  life.  But  on 
this  point  I  feel  that  I  can,  with  few  words,  safely  make  my 
appeal  to  the  members  of  this  Society. 

Many  of  you  are  scientific  men ;  others  are  literary  men ; 
some  are  professional  men.  I  believe,  from  your  own  personal 
experience,  you  will  bear  me  out  when  I  say  that,  with  a  single 
exception,  there  is  no  modern  scientific  study  which  can  be 
thoroughly  pursued  in  any  one  living  language,  even  with  the 
assistance  of  all  the  dead  languages  that  ever  were  spoken. 
The  researches  in  the  dead  languages  are  indeed  carried  on 
through  the  medium  of  several  living  languages.  I  have  ad- 
mitted there  is  one  exception  to  this  rule.  That  exception  is 
the  law.  Lawyers  alone,  I  believe,  join  with  our  statesmen  in 
caring  nothing  for  "  abroad."  Except  in  its  more  elevated  and 
theoretical  branches,  which  rarely  find  their  way  into  our  courts, 
the  law  is  a  purely  local  pursuit.  Those  who  follow  it  may 
grow  gray  in  active  practice,  and  yet  never  have  occasion  to 
consult  a  work  in  any  language  but  their  own.  It  is  not  so 
with  medicine  or  theology  or  science  or  art,  in  any  of  their 
numerous  branches,  or  with  government,  or  political  economy, 
or  with  any  other  of  the  whole  long  list.  With  the  exception 
of  law,  I  think  I  might  safely  challenge  any  one  of  you  to  name 
a  single  modern  calling,  either  learned  or  scientific,  in  which  a 
worker  who  is  unable  to  read  and  write  and  speak  at  least  Ger- 
man and  French,  does  not  stand  at  a  great  and  always  recurring 
disadvantage.     He  is  without  the  essential  tools  of  his  trade. 

The  modern  languages  are  thus  the  avenues  to  modern  life 
and  living  thought.  Under  these  circumstances,  what  was  the 
position  of  the  college  towards  them  thirty  years  ago  ?     What 


A  COLLEGE  FETICH.  1 5 

is  its  position  to-day?  It  intervened,  and  practically  said  then 
that  its  graduates  should  not  acquire  those  languages  at  that 
period  when  only  they  could  be  acquired  perfectly  and  with 
ease.  It  occupies  the  same  position  still.  It  did  and  does 
this  none  the  less  effectually  because  indirectly.  The  thing 
came  about,  as  it  still  comes  about,  in  this  way:  The  col- 
lege fixes  the  requirements  for  admission  to  its  course.  The 
schools  and  the  academies  adapt  themselves  to  those  require- 
ments. The  business  of  those  preparatory  schools  is  to  get 
the  boys  through  their  examinations,  not  as  a  means,  but  as 
an  end.  They  are  therefore  all  organized  on  one  plan.  To 
that  plan  there  is  no  exception ;  nor  practically  can  there  be 
any  exception.  The  requirements  for  admission  are  such  that 
the  labor  of  preparation  occupies  fully  the  boy's  study  hours. 
He  is  not  overworked,  perhaps,  but  when  his  tasks  are  done  he 
has  no  more  leisure  than  is  good  for  play ;  and  you  cannot  take 
a  healthy  boy  the  moment  he  leaves  school  and  set  him  down 
before  tutors  in  German  and  French.  If  you  do,  he  will  soon 
cease  to  be  a  healthy  boy;  and  he  will  not  learn  German  or 
French.  Over-education  is  a  crime  against  youth.  But  Har- 
vard College  says  :  "  We  require  such  and  such  things  for  ad- 
mission to  our  course."  First  and  most  emphasized  among 
them  are  Latin  and  Greek.  The  academies  accordingly  teach 
Latin  and  Greek ;  *and  they  teach  it  in  the  way  to  secure  admis- 
sion to  the  college.  Hence,  because  of  this  action  of  the  col- 
lege, the  schools  do  not  exist  in  this  country  in  which  my 
children  can  learn  what  my  experience  tells  me  it  is  all  essen- 
tial they  should  know.  They  cannot  both  be  fitted  for  college 
and  taught  the  modern  languages.  And  when  I  say  "  taught 
the  modern  languages,"  I  mean  taught  them  in  the  world's 
sense  of  the  word,  and  not  in  the  college  sense  of  it,  as  prac- 
tised both  in  my  time  and  now.  And  here  let  me  not  be  mis- 
understood, and  confronted  with  examination  papers.  I  am 
talking  of  really  knowing  something.  I  do  not  want  my 
children  to  get  a  smattering  knowledge  of  French  and  of  Ger- 


1 6  A  COLLEGE   FETICH. 

man,  such  a  knowledge  as  was  and  now  is  given  to  boys  of 
Latin  and  Greek ;  but  I  do  want  them  to  be  taught  to  write 
and  to  speak  those  languages,  as  well  as  to  read  them,  —  in  a 
word,  so  to  master  them  that  they  will  thereafter  be  tools  al- 
ways ready  to  the  hand.  This  requires  labor.  It  is  a  thing 
which  cannot  be  picked  up  by  the  wayside,  except  in  the 
countries  where  the  languages  are  spoken.  If  academies  in 
America  are  to  instruct  in  this  way,  they  must  devote  them- 
selves to  it.  But  the  college  requires  all  that  they  can  well 
undertake  to  do.  The  college  absolutely  insists  on  Latin  and 
Greek. 

Latin  I  will  not  stop  to  contend  over.  That  is  a  small  mat- 
ter. Not  only  is  it  a  comparatively  simple  language,  but,  apart 
from  its  literature,  —  for  which  I  cannot  myself  profess  to  have 
any  great  admiration,  —  it  has  its  modern  uses.  Not  only  is  it 
directly  the  mother  tongue  of  all  southwestern  Europe,  but  it 
has  by  common  consent  been  adopted  in  scientific  nomencla- 
ture. Hence,  there  are  reasons  why  the  educated  man  should 
have  at  least  an  elementary  knowledge  of  Latin.  That  knowl- 
edge also  can  be  acquired  with  no  great  degree  of  labor.  To 
master  the  language  would  be  another  matter ;  but  in  these 
days  few  think  of  mastering  it.  How  many  students  during 
the  last  thirty  years  have  graduated  from  Harvard  who  could 
read  Horace  and  Tacitus  and  Juvenal,  as  numbers  now  read 
Goethe  and  Mommsen  and  Heine?  If  there  have  been  ten,  I 
do  not  believe  there  have  been  a  score.  This  it  is  to  acquire 
a  language  !  A  knowledge  of  its  rudiments  is  a  wholly  different 
thing;  and  with  a  knowledge  of  the  rudiments  of  Latin  as  a 
requirement  for  admission  to  college  I  am  not  here  to  quarrel. 
Not  so  Greek.  The  study  of  Greek,  and  I  speak  from  the  un- 
mistakable result  of  my  own  individual  experience  in  active 
life,  as  well  as  from  that  of  a  long-continued  family  experience 
which  I  shall  presently  give,  —  the  study  of  Greek  in  the  way 
it  is  traditionally  insisted  upon,  as  the  chief  requirement  to  en- 
tering college,  is  a  positive  educational  wrong.     It  has  already 


A  COLLEGE  FETICH.  1 7 

wrought  great  individual  and  general  injury,  and  is  now  work- 
ing it.  It  has  been  productive  of  no  compensating  advantage. 
It  is  a  superstition. 

But  before  going  further  I  wish  to  emphasize  the  limitations 
under  which  I  make  this  statement,  I  would  not  be  misun- 
derstood. I  am  speaking  not  at  all  of  Greek  really  studied 
and  lovingly  learned.  Of  that  there  cannot  well  be  two 
opinions.  I  have  already  said  that  it  is  the  basis  of  the  finest 
scholarship.  I  have  in  mind  only  the  Greek  traditionally 
insisted  upon  as  the  chief  requirement  to  entering  College,  — 
the  Greek  learned  under  compulsion  by  nine  men  at  least  out 
of  each  ten  who  are  graduated.  It  is  that  quarter-acquired 
knowledge,  and  that  only,  of  which  I  insist  that  it  is  a  super- 
stition, and  educational  wrong.  Nor  can  it  ever  be  anything 
else.     It  is  a  mere  penalty  on  going  to  college. 

I  am  told  that  when  thoroughly  studied  Greek  becomes  a 
language  delightfully  easy  to  learn.  I  do  not  know  how  this 
may  be ;  but  I  do  know  that  when  learned  as  a  college  require- 
ment it  is  most  difficult,  —  far  more  difficult  than  Latin. 
Unlike  Latin,  also,  Greek,  partially  acquired,  has  no  modern 
uses.  Not  only  is  it  a  dead  tongue,  but  it  bears  no  immediate 
relation  to  any  living  speech  or  literature  of  value.  Like  all 
rich  dialects,  it  is  full  of  anomalies;  and  accordingly  its 
grammar  is  the  delight  of  grammarians,  and  the  despair  of 
every  one  else.  When  I  was  fitted  for  college,  the  study  of 
Greek  took  up  at  least  one  half  of  the  last  three  years  devoted 
to  active  preparation.  In  memory  it  looms  up  now,  through 
the  long  vista  of  years,  as  the  one  gigantic  nightmare  of  youth, 
—  and  no  more  profitable  than  nightmares  are  wont  to  be. 
Other  school-day  tasks  sink  into  insignificance  beside  it. 
When  we  entered  college  we  had  all  of  us  the  merest  super- 
ficial knowledge  of  the  language,  —  a  knowledge  measured  by 
the  ability  to  read  at  sight  a  portion  of  Xenophon,  a  little  of 
Herodotus,  and  a  book  or  tvvo  of  the  Iliad.  It  was  just  enough 
to  enable  us  to  meet  the  requirements  of  the  examination.     In 


1 8  A  COLLEGE  FETICH. 

all  these  respects,  my  inquiries  lead  me  to  conclude  that  what 
was  true  then  is  even  more  true  now.  In  the  vast  majority  oi' 
cases,  this  study  of  Greek  was  looked  upon  by  parent  and  stu- 
dent as  a  mere  college  requirement;  and  the  instructor  taught 
it  as  such.  It  was  never  supposed  for  an  instant  that  it  would 
be  followed  up.  On  the  contrary,  if  it  was  thought  of  at  all, 
instead  of  rather  taken  as  a  matter  of  course,  it  was  thought  of 
very  much  as  a  similar  amount  of  physical  exercise  with  dumb- 
bells or  parallel-bars  might  be  thought  of,  —  as  a  thing  to  be 
done  as  best  it  might,  and  there  an  tnd.  As  soon  as  possible 
after  entering  college  the  study  was  abandoned  forever,  and  the 
little  that  had  been  acquired  faded  rapidly  away  from  the 
average  student's  mind.  I  have  now  forgotten  the  Greek 
alphabet,  and  I  cannot  read  all  the  Greek  characters  if  I 
open  my  Homer.  Such  has  been  the  be-all  and  the  end-all 
of  the  tremendous  labor  of  my  schooldays. 

But  I  now  come  to  what  in  plain  language  I  cannot  but  call 
the  educational  cant  of  this  subject.  I  am  told  that  I  ignore 
the  severe  intellectual  training  I  got  in  learning  the  Greek 
grammar,  and  in  subsequently  applying  its  rules ;  that  my 
memory  then  received  an  education  which,  turned  since  to 
other  matters,  has  proved  invaluable  to  me ;  that  accumu- 
lated experience  shows  that  this  training  can  be  got  equally 
well  in  no  other  way;  that,  beyond  all  this,  even  my  slight 
contact  with  the  Greek  masterpieces  has  left  with  me  a  subtile 
but  unmistakable  residuum,  impalpable  perhaps,  but  still  there, 
and  very  precious ;  that,  in  a  word,  I  am  what  is  called  an 
educated  man,  which,  but  for  my  early  contact  with  Greek,  I 
would  not  be. 

It  was  Dr.  Johnson,  I  believe,  who  once  said,  "  Let  us  free 
our  minds  from  cant  ;  "  and  all  this,  with  not  undue  blunt- 
ncss  be  it  said,  is  unadulterated  nonsense.  The  fact  that  it 
has  been  and  will  yet  be  a  thousand  times  repeated,  cannot 
make  it  anything  else.  In  the  first  place,  I  very  confidently 
submit,  there  is  no  more  mental  training  in  learning  the  Greek 


A   COLLEGE   FETICH.  I9 

grammar  by  heart  than  in  learning  by  heart  any  other  equally 
difficult  and,  to  a  boy,  unintelligible  book.  As  a  mere  work 
of  memorizing,  Kant's  "  Critique  of  Pure  Reason  "  would  be  at 
least  as  good.  In  the  next  place,  unintelligent  memorizing  is 
at  best  a  most  questionable  educational  method.  For  one,  I 
utterly  disbelieve  in  it.  It  never  did  me  anything  but  harm ; 
and  learning  by  heart  the  Greek  grammar  did  me  harm,  —  a 
great  deal  of  harm.  While  I  was  doing  it,  the  observing  and 
reflective  powers  lay  dormant;  indeed,  they  were  systemati- 
cally suppressed.  Their  exercise  was  resented  as  a  sort  of  im- 
pertinence. We  boys  stood  up  and  repeated  long  rules,  and 
yet  longer  lists  of  exceptions  to  them,  and  it  was  drilled  into 
us  that  we  were  not  there  to  reason,  but  to  rattle  off  something 
written  on  the  blackboard  of  our  minds.  The  faculties  we  had 
in  common  with  the  raven  were  thus  cultivated  at  the  expense 
of  that  apprehension  and  reason  which,  Shakespeare  tells  us, 
makes  man  like  the  angels  and  God.  I  infer  this  memory- 
culture  is  yet  in  vogue;  for  only  yesterday,  as  I  sat  at  the 
Commencement  table  with  one  of  the  younger  and  more  active 
of  the  professors  of  the  college,  he  told  me  that  he  had  no  dif- 
ficulty with  his  students  in  making  them  commit  to  memory; 
they  were  well  trained  in  that.  But  when  he  called  on  them 
to  observe  and  infer,  then  his  troubles  began.  They  had  never 
been  led  in  such  a  path.  It  was  the  old,  old  story,  —  a  lamen- 
tation and  an  ancient  tale  of  wrong.  There  are  very  few  of  us 
who  were  educated  a  generation  ago  who  cannot  now  stand 
up  and  glibly  recite  long  extracts  from  the  Greek  grammar; 
sorry  am  I  to  say  it,  but  these  extracts  are  with  most  of  us  all 
we  have  left  pertaining  to  that  language.  But,  as  not  many  of 
us  followed  the  stage  as  a  calling,  this  power  of  rapidly  learn- 
ing a  part  has  proved  but  of  questionable  value.  It  is  true,  the 
habit  of  correct  verbal  memorizing  will  probably  enable  its 
fortunate  possessor  to  get  oft"  many  an  apt  quotation  at  the 
dinner-table,  and  far  be  it  from  me  to  detract  from  that  much 
longed-for  accomplishment ;  but,  after  all,  the  college  professes 


20  A   COLLEGE   FETICH. 

to  fit  its  students  for  life  rather  than  for  its  dinner-tables,  and 
in  life  a  happy  knack  at  quotations  is  in  the  long  run  an  indiffer- 
ent substitute  for  the  power  of  close  observation,  and  correct 
inference  from  it/  To  be  able  to  follow  out  a  line  of  exact, 
sustained  thought  to  a  given  result  is  invaluable.  It  is  a  weapon 
which  all  who  would  engage  successfully  in  the  struggle  of 
modern  life  must  sponer  or  later  acquire ;  and  they  are  apt  to 
succeed  just  in  the  degree  they  acquire  it.  In  my  youth  we 
were  supposed  to  acquire  it  through  the  blundering  application 
of  rules  of  grammar  in  a  language  we  did  not  understand.  The 
training  which  ought  to  have  been  obtained  in  physics  and  math- 
ematics was  thus  sought  for  long,  and  in  vain,  in  Greek.  That 
it  was  not  found,  is  small  cause  for  wonder  now.  And  so,  look- 
ing back  from  this  standpoint  of  thirty  years  later,  and  thinking 
of  the  game  which  has  now  been  lost  or  won,  I  silently  listen 
to  that  talk  about  "  the  severe  intellectual  training,"  in  which 
a  parrot-like  memorizing  did  its  best  to  degrade  boys  to  the 
level  of  learned  dogs. 

Finally,  I  come  to  the  great  impalpable-essence-and-precious- 
residuum  theory,  —  the  theory  that  a  knowledge  of  Greek 
grammar,  and  the  having  puzzled  through  the  Anabasis  and 
three  books  of  the  Iliad,  infuses  into  the  boy's  nature  the  im- 
perceptible spirit  of  Greek  literature,  which  will  appear  in  the 
results  of  his  subsequent  work,  just  as  manure,  spread  upon  a 
field,  appears  in  the  crop  which  that  field  bears.  But  to  pro- 
duce results  on  a  field,  manure  must  be  laboriously  worked 
into  its  soil,  and  made  a  part  of  it;  and  only  when  it  is  so 
worked  in,  and  does  become  a  part  of  it,  will  it  produce  its 
result.  You  cannot  haul  manure  up  and  down  and  across  a 
field,  cutting  the  ground  into  deep  ruts  with  the  wheels  of  your 
cart,  while  the  soil  just  gets  a  smell  of  what  is  in  the  cart,  and 
then  expect  to  get  a  crop.  Yet  even  that  is  more  than  we  did, 
and  are  doing,  with  Greek.  We  trundle  a  single  wheelbarrow- 
load  of  Greek  up  and  down  and  across  the  boy's  mind ;  and 
then  we  clasp  our  hands,  and  cant  about  a  subtile  fineness  and 


A   COLLEGE   FETICH.  21 

impalpable  but  very  precious  residuum  !  All  we  have  in  fact 
done  is  to  teach  the  boy  to  mistake  means  for  ends,  and  to 
make  a  system  of  superficiality. 

Nor  in  this  matter  am  I  speaking  unadvisedly  or  thought- 
lessly. My  own  experience  I  have  given.  For  want  of  a 
rational  training  in  youth  I  cannot  do  my  chosen  work  in  life 
thoroughly.  The  necessary  tools  are  not  at  my  command  ;  it  is 
too  late  for  me  to  acquire  them,  or  to  learn  familiarly  to  han- 
dle them ;  the  mischief  is  done.  I  have  also  referred  to  my 
family  experience.  Just  as  the  wrestler  in  the  gymnasium, 
after  describing  how  he  had  himself  fared  in  the  games,  might, 
in  support  of  his  conclusions,  refer  to  his  father  and  grand- 
father, who,  likewise  trained  in  the  gymnasium,  had  been  noted 
athletes  in  their  days,  so  I,  coming  here  and  speaking  from 
practical  experience,  and  practical  experience  alone,  must  cite 
that  experience  where  I  best  can  find  it.  I  can  find  it  best  at 
home.  So  I  appeal  to  a  family  experience  which  extends 
through  nearly  a  century  and  a  half.  It  is  worth  giving,  and 
very  much  to  the  point. 

I  do  not  think  I  exceed  proper  limits  when  I  say  that  the 
family  of  which  I  am  a  member  has,  for  more  than  a  hundred 
years,  held  its  own  with  the  average  of  Harvard  graduates. 
Indeed,  those  representing  it  through  three  consecutive  gener- 
ations were  rather  looked  upon  as  typical  scholars  in  politics. 
They  all  studied  Greek  as  a  requirement  to  admission  to  col- 
lege. In  their  subsequent  lives  they  were  busy  men.  Without 
being  purely  literary  men,  they  wrote  a  great  deal ;  indeed, 
the  pen  was  rarely  out  of  their  hands.  They  all  occupied  high 
public  position.  They  mixed  much  with  the  world.  Now  let 
us  see  what  their  actual  experience  in  life  was :  how  far  did 
their  college  requirements  fit  them  for  it?  Did  they  fit  them 
any  better  than  they  have  fitted  me?  I  begin  with  John 
Adams. 

John  Adams  graduated  in  the  class  of  1755,  —  a  hundred 
and  twenty-eight  years  ago.     We  have  his  own  testimony  on 


22  A   COLLEGE   FETICH. 

the  practical  value  to  him  of  his  Greek  learning,  expressed  in 
an  unguarded  moment,  and  in  a  rather  comical  way.  I  shall 
give  it  presently.  Meanwhile,  after  graduation  John  Adams 
was  a  busy  man  as  a  school-teacher,  a  lawyer  and  a  patriot, 
until  at  the  age  of  forty-two  he  suddenly  found  himself  on  the 
Atlantic,  accredited  to  France  as  the  representative  of  the 
struggling  American  colonies.  French  was  not  a  require- 
ment in  the  Harvard  College  of  the  last  century,  even  to 
the  modest  extent  in  which  it  is  a  requirement  now.  Greek 
was.  But  they  did  not  talk  Greek  in  the  diplomatic  circles 
of  Europe  then  any  more  than  they  now  talk  it  in  the 
Harvard  recitation-rooms ;  and  in  advising  John  Adams  of 
his  appointment,  James  Lovell  had  expressed  the  hope  that 
his  correspondent  would  not  allow  his  "  partial  defect  in  the 
language  "  to  stand  in  the  way  of  his  acceptance.  He  did 
not ;  but  at  forty-two,  with  his  country's  destiny  on  his  shoul- 
ders, John  Adams  stoutly  took  his  grammar  and  phrase-book 
in  hand,  and  set  himself  to  master  the  rudiments  of  that  living 
tongue  which  was  the  first  and  most  necessary  tool  for  use  in 
the  work  before  him.  What  he  afterwards  went  through  — 
the  anxiety,  the  humiliation,  the  nervous  wear  and  tear,  the 
disadvantage  under  which  he  struggled  and  bore  up  —  might 
best  be  appreciated  by  some  one  who  had  fought  for  his  life 
with  one  arm  disabled.     I  shall  not  attempt  to  describe  it. 

But  in  the  eighteenth  century  the  ordinary  educated  man 
set  a  higher  value  on  dead  learning  than  even  our  college  pro- 
fessors do  now;  and,  in  spite  of  his  experience,  no  one  thought 
more  of  it  than  did  John  Adams.  So  when  in  his  closing  years 
he  founded  an  academy,  he  especially  provided,  bowing  low 
before  the  fetich,  that  "  a  schoolmaster  should  be  procured, 
learned  in  the. Greek  and  Roman  languages,  and,  if  thought 
advisable,  the  Hebrew ;  not  to  make  learned  Hebricians,  but 
to  teach  such  young  men  as  choose  to  learn  it  the  Hebrew 
alphabet,  the  rudiments  of  the  Hebrew  grammar,  and  the  use 
of  the  Hebrew  grammar  and  lexicon,  that  in  after  life  they 


A  COLLEGE  FETICH.  .  23 

may  pursue  the  study  to  what  extent  they  please."  Instead  of 
taking  a  step  forward,  the  old  man  actually  took  one  back- 
wards. And  he  went  on  to  develop  the  following  happy  edu- 
cational theory,  which  if  properly  considered  in  the  light  of  the 
systematic  superficiality  of  thirty  years  ago,  to  which  I  have 
already  alluded,  shows  how  our  methods  had  then  deteriorated. 
What  was  taught  was  at  least  to  be  taught  thoroughly;  and,  as 
I  have  confessed,  I  have  forgotten  the  Greek  letters.  "  I  hope," 
he  wrote,  "  the  future  masters  will  not  think  me  too  presump- 
tuous, if  I  advise  them  to  begin  their  lessons  in  Greek  and  He- 
brew by  compelling  their  pupils  to  write  over  and  over  again 
copies  of  the  Greek  and  Hebrew  alphabets,  in  all  their  variety 
of  characters,  until  they  are  perfect  masters  of  those  alphabets 
and  characters.  This  will  be  as  good  an  exercise  in  chirog- 
raphy  as  any  they  can  use,  and  will  stamp  those  alphabets  and 
characters  upon  their  tender  minds  and  vigorous  memories  so 
deeply  that  the  impression  will  never  wear  out,  and  will  enable 
them  at  any  period  of  their  future  lives  to  study  those  languages 
to  any  extent  with  great  ease." 

This  was  fetich-worship,  pure  and  simple.  It  was  written  in 
the  year  1822.  But  practice  is  sometimes  better  than  theory, 
and  so  I  turn  back  a  little  to  see  how  John  Adams's  practice 
squared  with  his  theory.  In  his  own  case,  did  the  stamping 
of  those  Greek  characters  upon  his  tender  mind  and  vigorous 
memory  enable  him  at  a  later  period  "  to  study  that  language 
to  any  extent  with  great  ease"?  Let  us  see.  On  the  9th  of 
July,  181 3,  the  hard  political  wrangles  of  their  two  lives  being 
over,  and  in  the  midst  of  the  second  war  with  Great  Britain, 
I  find  John  Adams  thus  writing  to  Thomas  Jefferson,  —  and  I 
must  confess  to  very  much  preferring  John  Adams  in  his  easy 
letter-writing  undress,  to  John  Adams  on  his  dead-learning 
stilts ;  he  seems  a  wiser,  a  more  genuine  man.  He  is  answer- 
ing a  letter  from  Jefferson,  who  had  in  the  shades  of  Monticello 
been  reviving  his  Greek :  — 

"  Lord  !  Lord  !  what  can  I  do  with  so  much  Greek  ?     When  I  was 


24  .  A  COLLEGE  FETICH. 

of  your  age,  young  man,  that  is,  seven  or  eight  years  ago  [he  was  then 
nearly  seventy-nine,  and  his  correspondent  a  little  over  seventy],  I  felt 
a  kind  of  pang  of  affection  for  one  of  the  flames  of  my  youth,  and  again 
paid  my  addresses  to  Isqcrates  and  Dionysius  Halicarnassensis,  etc., 
etc.,  etc.  I  collected  all  my  lexicons  and  grammars,  and  sat  down  to 
Uepl  (TvvOeaeoi^  ovofiaTiov.  In  this  way  I  amused  myself  for  some  time, 
but  I  found  that  if  I  looked  a  word  to-day,  in  less  than  a  week  I  had 
to  look  it  again.  It  was  to  little  better  purpose  than  writing  letters  on 
a  pail  of  water." 

This  certainly  is  not  much  like  studying  Greek  "  to  any  ex- 
tent with  great  ease."  But  I  have  not  done  with  John  Adams 
yet.  A  year  and  one  week  later  I  find  him  again  writing  to 
Jefferson.  In  the  interval,  Jefferson  seems  to  have  read  Plato, 
sending  at  last  to  John  Adams  his  final  impressions  of  that 
philosopher.  To  this  letter,  on  the  i6th  of  July,  1814,  his  cor- 
respondent replies  as  follows :  — 

"  I  am  very  glad  you  have  seriously  read  Plato,  and  still  more  re- 
joiced to  find  that  your  reflections  upon  him  so  perfectly  harmonize 
with  mine.  Some  thirty  years  ago  I  took  upon  me  the  severe  task  of 
going  through  all  his  works.  With  the  help  of  two  Latin  translations, 
and  one  English  and  one  French  translation,  and  comparing  some  of 
the  most  remarkable  passages  with  the  Greek,  I  labored  through  the 
tedious  toil.  My  disappointment  was  very  great,  my  astonishment  was 
greater,  and  my  disgust  was  shocking.  Two  things  only  did  I  learn 
from  him.  First,  that  Franklin's  ideas  of  exempting  husbandmen  and 
mariners,  etc.,  from  the  depredations  of  war  were  borrowed  fi-om  him  ; 
and,  second,  that  sneezing  is  a  cure  for  the  hiccough.  Accordingly,  I 
have  cured  myself  and  all  my  friends  of  that  provoking  disorder,  for 
thirty  years,  with  a  pinch  of  snuff."  ^ 

As  a  sufficiently  cross-examined  witness  on  the  subject  of 
Greek  literature,  I  think  that  John  Adams  may  now  quit  the 
stand. 

More  fortunate  than  his  father,  John  Quincy  Adams  passed 
a  large  part  of  his   youth  in  Europe.      There,    in   the    easy 

1  John  Adams's  Works,  vol.  x.  pp.  49,  102. 


A   COLLEGE   FETICH.  2$ 

way  a  boy  docs,  he  picked  up  those  living  languages  so  in- 
estimably valuable  to  him  in  that  diplomatic  career  which 
subsequently  was  no  less  useful  to  his  country  than  it  was  hon- 
orable to  himself.  Presently  he  came  home,  and,  acquiring 
his  modicum  of  Greek,  graduated  at  Harvard  in  the  class  of 
1788.  Then  followed  his  long  public  life,  stretching  through 
more  than  half  a  century,  I  would,  for  the  sake  of  my  argu- 
rhent,  give  much  could  I  correctly  weigh  what  he  owed  during 
that  public  life  to  the  living  languages  he  had  picked  up  in 
Europe,  against  what  he  owed  to  the  requirements  of  Harvard 
College.  Minister  at  the  Hague,  at  Berlin,  and  at  St.  Peters- 
burg, negotiator  at  Ghent,  his  knowledge  of  living  tongues 
enabled  him  to  initiate  the  diplomatic  movement  which  re- 
stored peace  to  his  country.  At  St.  Petersburg  he  at  least 
was  not  tongue-tied.  Returning  to  America,  for  eight  years 
he  was  the  head  of  the  State  Department,  and  probably  the 
single  member  of  the  Government  who,  without  the  assistance 
of  an  interpreter,  could  hold  ready  intercourse  with  the  repre- 
sentatives of  other  lands.  Meanwhile,  so  far  as  Greek  was 
concerned,  I  know  he  never  read  it ;  and  I  suspect  that,  labor- 
loving  as  he  was,  he  never  could  read  it.  He  could  with  the 
aid  of  a  lexicon  puzzle  out  a  phrase  when  it  came  in  his  way, 
but  from  original  sources  he  knew  little  or  nothing  of  Greek 
literature.  It  would  have  been  better  for  him  if  he  had  also 
dropped  his  Latin.  I  have  already  said  that  the  display  of 
cheap  learning  made  the  American  oration  of  fifty  years  ago  a 
national  humiliation;  it  was  bedizened  with  classic  tinsel.  In 
this  respect  John  Quincy  Adams  shared  to  the  full  in  the 
affectation  of  his  time.  Ready,  terse,  quick  at  parry  and 
thrust  in  his  native  tongue,  speaking  plainly  and  directly  to 
the  point,  with  all  his  resources  at  his  immediate  command, 
—  I  think  I  may  say  he  never  met  his  equal  in  debate.  Yet 
when  in  lectures  and  formal  orations  he  mounted  the  classic 
high-horse  and  modelled  himself  on  Demosthenes  and  Cicero, 
he  became  a  poor  imitator.     As  an  imitator  he  was  as  bad  as 


26  A  COLLEGE  FETICIL 

Chatham.     More  could  not  be  said.     That  much  he  owed  to 
Harvard  College,  and  its  little  Latin  and  less  Greek. 

But  I  must  pass  on  to  the  third  generation.  Fortunate  like 
his  father,  Charles  Francis  Adams  spent  some  years  of  his 
boyhood  in  Europe,  and  in  many  countries  of  Europe ;  so  that 
at  six  years  old  he  could  talk,  as  a  child  talks,  in  no  less  than 
six  different  tongues.  Greek  was  not  among  them.  Return- 
ing to  America  he  too  fitted  for  Harvard,  and  in  so  doing  made 
a  bad  exchange ;  for  he  easily  got  rid  forever  of  the  German 
speech,  and  with  much  labor  acquired  in  place  thereof  the 
regulation  allowance  6f  Greek.  He  was  graduated  in  the  class 
of  1825.  After  graduation,  having  more  leisure  than  his  father 
or  grandfather,  —  that  is,  not  being  compelled  to  devote  him- 
self to  an  exacting  profession,  —  he,  as  the  phrase  goes,  "  kept 
up  his  Greek."  That  is,  he  occupied  himself  daily,  for  an  hour 
or  so,  with  the  Greek  masterpieces,  puzzling  them  laboriously 
out  with  the  aid  of  grammar  and  lexicon.  He  never  acquired 
any  real  familiarity  with  the  tongue ;  for  I  well  remember  that 
when  my  turn  at  the  treadmill  came,  and  he  undertook  to  aid 
me  at  my  lessons,  we*  were  very  much  in  the  case  of  a  boy 
who  was  nearly  blind,  being  led  by  a  man  who  could  only 
very  indistinctly  see.  Still  he  for  years  "  kept  up  his  Greek," 
and  was  on  the  examining-committee  of  the  College.  And 
now,  looking  back,  I  realize  at  what  a  sad  cost  to  himself  he 
did  this  ;  for  in  doing  it  he  lost  the  step  of  his  own  time.  Had 
he  passed  those  same  morning  hours  in  keeping  himself 
abreast  with  modern  thought  in  those  living  tongues  he  had 
acquired  in  his  infancy,  and  allowed  his  classics  to  rest  undis- 
turbed on  his  library  shelves,  he  would  have  been  a  wiser,  a 
happier,  and  a  far  more  useful  man.  But  modern  thought 
(apart  from  politics),  modern  science,  modern  romance  and 
modern  poetry  soon  ceased  to  have  any  charm  for  him.  Nev- 
ertheless, he  did  not  wholly  lose  the  more  useful  lessons  of  his 
infancy.  For  years,  as  I  have  said,  he  officiated  on  the  Greek 
examining-committee  of  the  College  ;  but  at  last  the  time  came 


A  COLLEGE  FETICH.  2^ 

when  his  country  needed  a  representative  on  a  board  of  inter- 
national arbitration.  Then  he  laid  his  lexicon  and  grammar 
aside  forever,  and  the  almost  forgotten  French  of  his  boyhood 
was  worth  more  —  a  thousand-fold  more  —  to  him  and  his 
country  than  all  the  concentrated  results  of  the  wasted  leisure 
hours  of  his  maturcr  hfe. 

I  come  now  to  the  fourth  generation,  cutting  deep  into  the 
second  century.  My  father  had  four  sons.  We  were  all 
brought  up  on  strict  traditional  principles,  the  special  family 
experience  being  carefully  ignored.  We  went  to  the  Latin 
schools,  and  there  wasted  the  best  hours  of  our  youth  over  the 
Greek  grammar,  —  hours  during  which  we  might  have  been 
talking  French  and  German,  —  and  presently  we  went  to  Har- 
vard. When  we  got  there  we  dropped  Greek,  and  with  one 
voice  we  have  all  deplored  the  irreparable  loss  we  sustained  in 
being  forced  to  devote  to  it  that  time  and  labor  which,  other- 
wise applied,  would  have  produced  results  now  invaluable. 
One  brother,  since  a  Professor  at  Harvard,  whose  work  here 
was  not  without  results,  wiser  than  the  rest,  went  abroad  after 
graduation,  and  devoted  two  years  to  there  supplying,  imper- 
fectly and  with  great  labor,  the  more  glaring  deficiencies  of 
his  college  training.  Since  then  the  post-graduate  knowl- 
edge thus  acquired  has  been  to  him  an  indispensable  tool  of 
his  trade.  Sharing  in  the  modern  contempt  for  a  superficial 
learning,  he  has  not  wasted  his  time  over  dead  languages 
which  he  could  not  hope  thoroughly  to  master.  Another  of 
the  four,  now  a  Fellow  of  the  University,  has  certainly  made  no 
effort  to  keep  up  his  Greek.  When,  however,  his  sons  came 
forward,  a  fifth  generation  to  fit  for  college,  looking  back  over 
his  own  experience  as  he  watched  them  at  their  studies,  his 
eyes  were  opened.  Then  in  language  certainly  not  lacking  in 
picturesque  vigor,  but  rather  profane  than  either  classical  or 
sacred,  he  expressed  to  me  his  mature  judgment.  While  he 
looked  with  inexpressible  self-contempt  on  that  worthless 
smatter  of  the  classics  which  gave  him  the  title  of  an  educated 


28  A   COLLEGE  FETICH. 

man,  he  declared  that  his  inabiHty  to  follow  modern  thought 
in  other  tongues,  or  to  meet  strangers  on  the  neutral  ground 
of  speech,  had  been  and  was  to  him  a  source  of  life-long 
regret  and  the  keenest  mortification.  In  obedience  to  the 
stern  behest  of  his  Alma  Mater  he  then  proceeded  to  sacrifice 
his  children  to  the  fetich. 

My  own  experience  I  have  partly  given.  It  is  unnecessary 
for  me  to  repeat  it.  Speaking  in  all  moderation,  I  will  merely 
say  that,  so  far  as  I  am  able  to  judge,  the  large  amount  of  my 
youthful  time  devoted  to  the  study  of  Greek,  both  in  my  school 
and  college  life,  was  time  as  nearly  as  possible  thrown  away. 
I  suppose  I  did  get  some  discipline  out  of  that  boyish  martyr- 
dom. I  should  have  got  some  discipline  out  of  an  equal  num- 
ber of  hours  spent  on  a  treadmill.  But  the  discipline  I  got 
for  the  mind  out  of  the  study  of  Greek,  so  far  as  it  was  carried 
and  in  the  way  in  which  it  was  pursued  in  my  case,  was  very 
much  such  discipline  as  would  be  acquired  on  the  treadmill 
for  the  body.  I  do  not  think  it  was  any  higher  or  any  more 
intelligent.  Yet  I  studied  Greek  with  patient  fidelity;  and 
there  are  not  many  modern  graduates  who  can  say,  as  I  can, 
that  they  have,  not  without  enjoyment,  read  the  Iliad  through 
in  the  original  from  its  first  line  to  its  last.  But  I  read  it  ex- 
actly as  some  German  student,  toiling  at  English,  might  read 
Shakespeare  or  Milton.  As  he  slowly  puzzled  them  out,  an 
hundred  lines  in  an  hour,  what  insight  would  he  get  into  the 
pathos,  the  music  and  the  majesty  of  Lear  or  of  the  Paradise 
Lost?  What  insight  did  I  get  into  Homer?  And  then  they 
actually  tell  me  to  my  face  that  unconsciously,  through  the 
medium  of  a  grammar,  a  lexicon  and  Felton's  Greek  Reader, 
the  subtile  spirit  of  a  dead  literature  was  and  is  infused  into  a 
parcel  of  boys ! 

So  much  for  what  my  Alma  Mater  gave  me.  In  these  days 
of  repeating-rifles,  she  sent  me  and  my  classmates  out  into 
the  strife  equipped  wijth  shields  and  swords  and  javelins.  We 
were  to  grapple  with  living  questions  through  the  medium  of 


A  COLLEGE   FETICH.  29 

dead  languages.  It  seems  to  mc  I  have  heard,  somewhere  else, 
of  a  child's  cry  for  bread  being  answered  with  a  stone.  But  on 
this  point  I  do  not  like  publicly  to  tell  the  whole  of  my  own 
experience.  It  has  been  too  bitter,  too  humiliating.  Repre- 
senting American  educated  men  in  the  world's  industrial  gath- 
erings, I  have  occupied  a  position  of  confessed  inferiority.  I 
have  not  been  the  equal  of  my  peers.  It  was  the  world's 
Congress  of  to-day,  and  Latin  and  Greek  were  not  current 
money  there. 

Such  is  a  family  and  individual  experience  covering  a  cen- 
tury and  a  half.  With  that  experience  behind  me,  I  have  sons 
of  my  own  coming  forward.  I  want  them  to  go  to  college,  — 
to  Harvard  College ;  but  I  do  not  want  them  to  go  there  by 
the  path  their  fathers  trod.  It  seems  to  me  that  four  genera- 
tions ought  to  suffice.  Neither  is  my  case  a  single  one.  I  am, 
on  the  contrary,  one  of  a  large  class  in  the  community,  very 
many  of  whom  are  more  imbued  than  I  with  the  scientific  and 
thorough  spirit  of  the  age.  As  respects  our  children,  the 
problem  before  us  is  a  simple  one,  and  yet  one  very  difficult 
of  practical  solution.  We  want  no  more  classical  veneer. 
Whether  on  furniture  or  in  education,  we  do  not  admire 
veneer.  Either  impart  to  our  children  the  dead  languages 
thoroughly  or  the  living  languages  thoroughly;  or,  better 
yet,  let  them  take  their  choice  of  either.  This  is  just  what 
the  colleges  do  not  do.  On  the  contrary,  Harvard  stands 
directly  in  the  way  of  what  a  ccntury-and-a-half's  experience 
tells  me  is  all  important. 

I  have  already  referred  to  the  way  in  which  this  comes  about. 
It  was  Polonius,  I  think,  who  suggested  to  his  agent  that  he 
should  "by  indirections  find  directions  out;  "  and  that  is  what 
Harvard  does  with  our  youth.  Economically  speaking,  the 
bounty  or  premium  put  upon  Greek  is  so  heavy  that  it 
amounts  to  a  prohibition  of  other  things.  To  fit  a  boy  for 
college  is  now  no  small  task.  The  doing  so  is  a  specialty  in 
itself;  for  the  standard  has  been  raised,  and  the  list  of  require- 


30  A   COLLEGE   FETICH. 

ments  increased.  Candidates  for  admission  to  the  Freshman 
Class  must  know  a  little  of  a  good  many  things.  To  acquire 
this  multifarious  fractional  knowledge  takes  a  great  deal  of 
time.  To  impart  it  in  just  the  proper  quantities,  anjd  in  such 
a  way  that  it  shall  all  be  on  hand  and  ready  for  exhibition  on 
a  given  day,  affords  the  teachers  of  the  academies,  as  I  am 
given  to  understand,  all  the  occupation  they  crave.  The  re- 
quirements being  thus  manifold,  it  is  a  case  of  expressio  unins, 
exchisio  altcrius.  Accordingly,  one  thing  crowding  another 
out,  there  does  not  exist,  so  far  as  I  am  able  to  learn,  a  single 
school  in  the  country  which  will  at  the  same  time  prepare  my 
sons  for  college,  and  for  what  I,  by  long  and  hard  experience, 
perfectly  well  know  to  be  the  life  actually  before  them.  The 
simple  fact  is  that  the  college  faculty  tell  me  that  I  do  not 
know  what  a  man  really  needs  to  enable  him  to  do  the  edu- 
cated work  of  modern  life  well ;  and  I,  who  for  twenty  years 
have  been  engaged  in  that  .work,  can  only  reply  that  the  mem- 
bers of  the  faculty  are  laboring  under  a  serious  misappre- 
hension as  to  what  life  is.  It  is  a  something  made  up,  not 
of  theories,  but  of  facts,  —  and  of  confoundedly  hard  facts,  at 
that. 

The  situation  has  its  comical  side,  and  is  readily  suggestive 
of  sarcasm.  Unfortunately,  it  has  its  serious  side  also.  It  is 
not  so  very  easy  to  elude  the  fetich.  Of  course,  where  means 
are  ample  it  is  possible  to  improvise  an  academy  through 
private  instruction.  But  the  contact  with  his  equals  in  the 
class  and  on  the  playground  is  the  best  education  a  boy  ever 
gets, — ^  better  than  a  rudimentary  knowledge  of  Greek,  even. 
According  to  my  observation,  to  surround  children  with  tutors 
at  home  is  simply  to  emasculate  them.  Then,  again,  they  can 
be  sent  to  Europe  and  to  the  schools  there.  But  that  way 
danger  lies.  For  myself,  whatever  my  children  are  not,  I  want 
them  to  be  Americans.  If  they  go  to  Europe,  I  must  go  with 
them ;  but  as  the  people  of  modern  Europe  do  not  speak 
Greek  and  Latin,  in  which  learned  tongues  alone  I  am  theoreti- 


•    A   COLLEGE   FETICIL  3 1 

cally  at  home,  a  sojourn  of  some  years  in  a  foreign  academic 
town,  though  as  a  remedy  it  may  be  effective,  yet  at  the  time 
of  Hfe  at  which  those  of  my  generation  have  now  unhappily 
arrived,  it  partakes  also  of  the  heroic. 

Such  is  the  dilemma  in  which  I  find  myself  placed.  Such  is 
the  common  dilemma  in  which  all  those  are  placed  who  sec 
and  feel  the  world  as  I  have  seen  and  felt  it.  We  are  the 
modernists  and  a  majority ;  but  in  the  eyes  of  the  classicists 
we  are,  I  fear,  a  vulgar  and  contemptible  majority.  Yet  I 
cannot  believe  that  this  singular  condition  of  affairs  will  last  a 
great  while  longer.  The  measure  of  reform  seems  very  simple 
and  wholly  reasonable.  The  modernist  does  not  ask  to  have 
German  and  French  substituted  for  Greek  and  Latin  as  the 
basis  of  all  college  education.  I  know  that  he  is  usually  rep- 
resented as  seeking  this  change,  and  of  course  I  shall  be 
represented  as  seeking  it.  This,  however,  is  merely  one  of 
those  wilful  misrepresentations  to  which  the  more  disingenu- 
ous defenders  of  vested  interests  always  have  recourse.  So 
far  from  demanding  that  Greek  and  Latin  be  driven  out  and 
French  and  German  substituted  for  them,  we  do  not  even  ask 
that  the  modern  languages  be  put  on  an  equal  footing  with 
the  classic.  Recognizing,  as  every  intelligent  modernist  must, 
that  the  command  of  several  languages,  besides  that  which  is 
native  to  him,  is  essential  to  a  liberally  educated  man,  —  recog- 
nizing this  fundamental  fact,  those  who  feel  as  I  feel  would  by 
no  means  desire  that  students  should  be  admitted  to  the  college 
who  could  pass  their  examinations  in  German  and  French, 
instead  of  Greek  and  Latin.  We  are  willing  —  at  least  I 
am  willing  —  to  concede  a  preference,  and  a  great  preference, 
to  the  dead  over  the  living,  to  the  classic  over  the  modern. 
All  I  would  ask,  would  be  that  the  preference  afforded  to  the 
one  should  no  longer,  as  now,  amount  to  the  practical  prohi- 
bition of  the  other.  I  should  not  even  wish  for  instance,  that, 
on  the  present  basis  of  real  familiarity,  Greek  should  count 
against  French  and  German  combined  as  less  than  three  counts 


32  A   COLLEGE   FETICH. 

against  one.  This,  it  seems  to  me,  should  afford  a  sufficient 
bounty  on  Greek.  In  other  words,  the  modernist  asks  of  the 
college  to  change  its  requirements  for  admission  only  in  this 
wise :  Let  it  say  to  the  student  who  presents  himself,  "  In 
what  languages,  besides  Latin  and  English,  —  those  are  re- 
quired of  all,  —  in  what  other  languages  —  Hebrew,  Greek, 
German,  French,  Spanish,  or  Italian  —  will  you  be  examined?" 
If  the  student  replies,  "  In  Greek,"  so  be  it,  —  let  him  be  ex- 
amined in  that  alone;  and  if,  as  now,  he  can  stumble  through 
a  few  lines  of  Xenophon  or  Homer,  and  render  some  simple 
English  sentences  into  questionable  Greek,  let  that  suffice. 
As  respects  languages,  let  him  be  pronounced  fitted  for  a  col- 
lege course.  If,  however,  instead  of  offering  himself  in  the 
classic,  he  offers  himself  in  the  modern  tongues,  then,  though 
no  mercy  be  shown  him,  let  him  at  least  no  longer  be  turned 
contemptuously  away  from  the  college  doors;  but,"  instead 
of  the  poor,  quarter-knowledge,  ancient  and  modern,  now 
required,  let  him  be  permitted  to  pass  such  an  examination 
as  will  show  that  he  has  so  mastered  two  languages  besides  his 
own  that  he  can  go  forward  in  his  studies,  using  them  as 
working  tools.  Remember  that,  though  we  are  modernists,  we 
are  yet  your  fellow-students ;  and  so  we  pray  you  to  let  us 
and  our  children  sit  at  the  common  table  of  the  Alma  Mater, 
even  though  it  be  below  the  salt. 

That  an  elementary  knowledge  of  one  dead  language  should 
count  as  equal  to  a  thorough  familiarity  with  two  living  lan- 
guages ought,  I  submit,  to  be  accepted  as  a  sufficient  educa- 
tional bounty  on  the  former,  and  brand  of  inferiority  on 
the  latter.  The  classicist  should  in  reason  ask  for  no  more. 
He  should  not  insist  that  his  is  the  only,  as  well  as  the  royal, 
road  to  salvation.  Meanwhile  the  modernist  would  be  per- 
fectly satisfied  with  recognition  on  any  terms.  He  most  cer- 
tainly does  not  wish  to  see  modern  languages,  or  indeed 
any  other  subject,  taught  in  preparatory  schools  as  Greek 
w'as  taught  in  them  when  we  were  there,  or  as  it  is  taught 


A   COLLEGE   FETICH.  33 

in  them  now,  —  I  mean  as  a  mere  college  requirement.  Be- 
lieving, as  the  scientific  modernist  does,  that  a  little  knowl- 
edge is  a  contemptible  thing,  he  does  not  wish  to  see  the 
old  standard  of  examinations  in  the  dead  languages  any- 
longer  applied  to  the  living.  On  the  contrary,  we  wish 
to  see  the  standard  raised;  and  we  know  perfectly  well 
that  it  can  be  raised.  If  a  youth  wants  to  enter  college  on 
the  least  possible  basis  of  solid  acquirement,  by  all  means  let 
Greek,  as  it  is,  be  left  open  for  him.  If,  however,  he  takes  the 
modern  languages,  let  him  do  so  with  the  distinct  understand- 
ing that  he  must  master  those  languages.  After  he  enters  the 
examination-room  no  word  should  be  uttered  except  in  the 
language  in  which  he  is  there  to  be  examined. 

Consider  now,  for  a  moment,  what  would  be  the  effect  on  the 
educational  machinery  of  the  country  of  this  change  in  the  col- 
lege requirements.  The  modern,  scientific,  thorough  spirit 
would  at  once  assert  itself  Up  to  this  time  it  has,  by  that 
tradition  and  authority  which  are  so  powerful  in  things  educa- 
tional, been  held  in  subjection.  Remove  the  absolute  protec- 
tion which  hitherto  has  been  and  now  is  accorded  to  Greek, 
and  many  a  parent  would  at  once  look  about  for  a  modern,  as 
opposed  to  a  classical,  academy.  To  meet  the  college  require- 
ments, that  academy  would  have  to  be  one  in  which  no  English 
word  would  be  spoken  in  the  higher  recitation-rooms.  Every 
school  exercise  would  be  conducted  by  American  masters  pro- 
ficient in  the  foreign  tongues.  The  scholars  would  have  to 
learn  languages  by  hearing  them  and  talking  them.  The  nat- 
ural law  of  supply  and  demand  would  then  assert  itself  The 
dcn\and  is  now  a  purely  artificial  one,  but  the  supply  of  Gfeek 
and  Latin,  such  as  it  is,  comes  in  response  to  it.  Once  let  a 
thorough  knowledge  of  German  and  French  and  Spanish  be  as 
good  tender  at  the  college-door  as  a  fractional  knowledge  of 
either  of  the  first  two  of  those  languages  and  of  Greek  now 
is,  ^nd  the  academies  would  supply  that  thorough  knowledge 
also.  If  the  present  academies  did  not  supply  it,  other  and 
better  academics  would. 


34  A  COLLEGE  FETICH. 

But  I  have  heard  it  argued  that  in  order  to  attain  the  ends  I 
have  in  view  no  such  radical  change  as  that  involved  in  drop- 
ping Greek  from  the  list  of  college  requirements  is  at  all  neces- 
sary. The  experience  of  Montaigne  is  cited,  told  in  Montaigne's 
charming  language.  It  is  then  asserted  that  the  compulsory- 
study  of  Greek  has  not  been  discontinued  in  foreign  colleges ; 
and  yet,  as  we  all  know,  the  students  of  those  colleges  have  an 
ever  increasing  mastery  of  the  living  tongues.  I  do  not  propose 
to  enter  into  this  branch  of  the  discussion.  I  do  not  profess 
to  be  informed  as  to  what  the  universities  of  other  lands  have 
done.  As  I  have  repeatedly  said,  I  have  nothing  of  value  to 
contribute  to  this  debate  except  practical,  individual  experi- 
ence. So  in  answer  to  the  objections  I  have  just  stated,  I 
hold  it  sufficient  for  my  purpose  to  reply  that  we  have  to  deal 
with  America,  and  not  with  Germany  or  France  or  Great 
Britain.  The  educational  and  social  conditions  are  not  the 
same  here  as  in  those  countries.  Our  home-life  is  different, 
our  schools,  are  different;  wealth  is  otherwise  distributed; 
the  machinery  for  special  instruction  which  is  found  there 
cannot  be  found  here.  However  it  may  be  in  England  or 
in  Prussia,  however  it  may  hereafter  be  in  this  country,  our 
children  cannot  now  acquire  foreign  languages,  living  or  dead, 
in  the  easy,  natural  way,  —  in  the  way  in  which  Montaigne 
acquired  them.  The  appliances  do  not  exist  Consequently 
there  is  not  room  in  one  and  the  same  preparatory  school 
for  both  the  modernist  and  the  classicist.  Under  existing 
conditions  the  process  of  acquiring  the  languages  is  too  slow 
and  laborious;  the  one  crowds  out  the  other.  In  the  univer- 
sity it  is  not  so.  The  two  could  from  the  beginning  there  move 
side  by  side ;  under  the  elective  system  they  do  so  already, 
during  the  last  three  years  of  the  course.  I  would  put  no 
obstacle  in  the  way  of  the  scholar  whose  tastes  turn  to  classic 
studies.  On  the  contrary,  I  would  afford  him  every  assistance, 
and  no  longer  clog  and  encumber  his  progress  by  tying  him  to 
a  whole  class-room  of  others  whose  tastes  run   in  opposite 


A   COLLEGE   FETICH.  35 

directions,  or  in  no  direction  at  all.  Indeed,  it  is  curious  to 
think  how  much  the  standard  of  classic  requirements  might  be 
raised,  were  not  the  better  scholars  weighted  down  by  the  pres- 
ence of  the  worse.  But  while  welcoming  the  classicist,  why 
not  also  welcome  the  modernist?  Why  longer  say,  "By 
this  one  avenue  only  shall  the  college  be  approached  "  ?  Why 
this  narrow,  this  intolerant  spirit?  After  all,  the  university  is  a 
part  of  the  machinery  of  the  world  in  which  we  live ;  and,  as  I 
have  already  more  than  once  intimated,  the  college  student 
does  not  get  very  far  into  that  world,  after  leaving  these  classic 
shades,  before  he  is  made  to  realize  that  it  is  a  world  of  facts, 
and  very  hard  facts.  As  one  of  those  facts,  I  would  like  to 
suggest  that  there  are  but  two,  or  at  most  three,  languages 
spoken  on  these  continents  in  which  ours  is  the  dominant 
race.  There  is  a  saying  that  a  living  dog  is  better  than  a  dead 
lion ;  and  the  Spanish  tongue  is  what  the  Greek  is  not,  —  a 
very  considerable  American  fact. 

Here. I  might  stop;  and  here,  perhaps,  I  ought  to  stop.  I 
am,  however,  unwilling  to  do  so  without  a  closing  word  on  one 
other  topic.  For  the  sake  of  my  argument,  and  to  avoid  mak- 
ing a  false  issue,  I  have  in  everything  I  have  said,  as  between 
the  classic  and  modern  languages,  fully  yielded  the  preference 
to  the  former.  I  have  treated  a  mastery  of  the  living  tongues 
simply  as  an  indispensable  tool  of  trade,  or  medium  of  speech 
and  thought.  It  was  a  thing  which  the  scholar,  the  professional 
man  and  the  scientist  of  to-day  must  have,  or  be  unequal  to 
his  work.  I  have  made  no  reference  to  the  accumulated  lit- 
erary wealth  of  the  modern  tongues,  much  less  compared  their 
masterpieces  with  those  of  Greece  or  Rome.  Yet  I  would  not 
have  it  supposed  that  in  taking  this  view  of  the  matter  I 
express  my  full  belief.  On  the  contrary,  I  most  shrewdly 
suspect  that  there  is  in  what  are  called  the  educated  classes, 
both  in  this  country  and  in  Europe,  a  very  considerable 
amount  of  affectation  and  credulity  in  regard  to  the  Greek  and 


36  A  COLLEGE  FETICH. 

Latin  masterpieces.  That  is  jealously  prized  as  part  of  the 
body  of  the  classics,  which  if  published  to-day,  in  German  or 
French  or  English,  would  not  excite  a  passing  notice.  There 
are  immortal  poets,  whose  immortality,  my  mature  judgment 
tells  me,  is  wholly  due  to  the  fact  that  they  lived  two  thousand 
years  ago.  Even  a  dead  language  cannot  veil  extreme  ten- 
uity of  thought  and  fancy ;  and,  as  we  have  seen,  John  Adams 
and  Thomas  Jefferson  were  in  their  day  at  a  loss  to  account 
for  the  reputation  even  of  Plato. 

In  any  event,  this  thing  I  hold  to  be  indisputable :  of  those 
who  study  the  classic  languages,  not  one  in  a  hundred  ever 
acquires  that  familiarity  with  them  which  enables  him  to  judge 
whether  a  given  literary  composition  is  a  masterpiece  or  not. 
Take  your  own  case  and  your  own  language  for  instance.  For 
myself,  I  can  freely  say  that  it  has  required  thirty  years  of  in- 
cessant and  intelligent  practice,  with  eye  and  ear  and  tongue 
and  pen,  to  give  me  that  ready  mastery  of  the  English  language 
which  enables  me  thoroughly  to  appreciate  the  more  subtile 
beauties  of  the  English  literature.  I  fancy  that  it  is  in  our 
native  tongue  alone,  or  in  some  tongue  in  which  we  have 
acquired  as  perfect  a  facility  as  we  have  in  our  native  tongue, 
that  we  ever  detect  those  finer  shades  of  meaning,  that  hap- 
pier choice  of  words,  that  more  delicate  flavor  of  style, 
which  alone  reveal  the  master.  Many  men  here,  for  in- 
stance, who  cannot  speak  French  or  German  fluently,  can  read 
French  and  German  authors  more  readily  than  any  living  man 
can  read  Greek,  or  than  any,  outside  of  a  few  college  profes- 
sors, can  read  Latin ;  yet  they  cannot  see  in  the  French  or 
German  masterpieces  what  those  can  see  there  who  are  to  the 
language  born.  The  familiarity,  therefore,  with  the  classic 
tongues  which  would  enable  a  man  to  appreciate  the  classic 
literatures  in  any  real  sense  of  the  term  is  a  thing  which  can- 
not be  generally  imparted.  Even  if  the  beauties  which  are 
claimed  to  be  there  are  there,  they  must  perforce  remain 
concealed  from  all,  save  a  very  few,  outside  of  the  class  of 
professional  scholars. 


A   COLLEGE  FETICPL  -i^J 

But  arc  those  transcendent  beauties  really  there  ?  I  greatly 
doubt.  I  shall  never  be  able  to  judge  for  myself,  for  a  mere 
lexicon-and-grammar  acquaintance  with  a  language  I  hold  to 
be  no  acquaintance  at  all.  But  we  can  judge  a  little  of  what 
we  do  not  know  by  what  we  do  know,  and  I  find  it  harder  and 
harder  to  believe  that  in  practical  richness  the  Greek  literature 
equals  the  German,  or  the  Latin  the  French.  Leaving  practi- 
cal richness  aside,  are  there  in  the  classic  masterpieces  any  bits 
of  literary  workmanship  which  take  precedence  of  what  may 
be  picked  out  of  Shakspeare  and  Milton  and  Bunyan  and 
Clarendon  and  Addison  and  Swift  and  Goldsmith  and  Gray 
and  Burke  and  Gibbon  and  Shelley  and  Burns  and  Macaulay 
and  Carlyle  and  Hawthorne  and  Thackeray  and  Tennyson? 
If  there  are  any  such  transcendent  bits,  I  can  only  say  that 
our  finest  scholars  have  failed  most  lamentably  in  their  at- 
tempts at  rendering  them  into  English. 

For  myself,  I  cannot  but  think  that  the  species  of  sanctity 
which  has  now,  ever  since  the  revival  of  learning,  hedged  the 
classics,  is  destined  soon  to  disappear.  Yet  it  is  still  strong; 
indeed,  it  is  about  the  only  patent  of  nobility  which  has  sur- 
vived the  levelling  tendencies  of  the  age.  A  man  who  at 
some  period  of  his  life  has  studied  Latin  and  Greek  is  an 
educated  man ;  he  who  has  not  done  so  is  only  a  self-taught 
man.  Not  to  have  studied  Latin,  irrespective  of  any  present 
ability  to  read  it,  is  accounted  a  thing  to  be  ashamed  of;  to 
be  unable  to  speak  French  is  merely  an  inconvenience.  I 
submit  that  it  is  high  time  this  superstition  should  come  to  an 
end.  I  do  not  profess  to  speak  with  authority,  but  I  have  cer- 
tainly mixed  somewhat  with  the  world,  its  labors  and  its  litera- 
tures, in  several  countries,  through  a  third  of  a  century ;  and  I 
am  free  to  say,  that,  whether  viewed  as  a  thing  of  use,  as  an 
accomplishment,  as  a  source  of  pleasure,  or  as  a  mental  train- 
ing, I  would  rather  myself  be  familiar  with  the  German  tongue 
and  its  literature  than  be  equally  familiar  with  the  Greek.  I 
would  unhesitatingly  make  the  same  choice  for  my  child.   What 


38  A  COLLEGE  FETICH. 

I  have  said  of  German  as  compared  with  Greek,  I  will  also  say 
of  French  as  compared  with  Latin.  On  this  last  point  J  have 
no  question.  Authority  and  superstition  apart,  I  am  indeed 
unable  to  see  how  an  intelligent  man,  having  any  considerable 
acquaintance  with  the  two  literatures,  can,  as  respects  either 
richness  or  beauty,  compare  the  Latin  with  the  French ;  while 
as  a  worldly  accomplishment,  were  it  not  for  fetich -worship,  in 
these  days  of  universal  travel  the  man  would  be  properly 
jegarded  as  out  of  his  mind  who  preferred  to  be  able  to  read 
the  odes  of  Horace,  rather  than  to  feel  at  home  in  the  accepted 
neutral  language  of  all  refined  society.  This  view  of  the  case 
is  not  yet  taken  by  the  colleges. 

"The  slaves  of  custom  and  established  mode, 
With  pack-horse  constancy  we  keep  the  road, 
Crooked  or  straight,  through  quags  or  thorny  dells, 
True  to  the  jingling  of  our  leader's  bells." 

And  yet  I  am  practical  and  of  this  world  enough  to  believe, 
that  in  a  utilitarian  and  scientific  age  the  living  will  not  for- 
ever be  sacrificed  to  the  dead.  The  worship  even  of  the  classi- 
cal fetich  draweth  to  a  close ;  and  I  shall  hold  that  I  was  not 
myself  sacrificed  wholly  in  vain,  if  what  I  have  said  here  may 
contribute  to  so  shaping  the  policy  of  Harvard  that  it  will  not 
much  longer  use  its  prodigious  influence  towards  indirectly 
closing  for  its  students,  as  it  closed  for  me,  the  avenues  to 
modern  life  and  the  fountains  of  living  thought. 


DATE  DUE 


CAVLORO 

PMINTCO  INU-S-*. 

